Fastest Pastor: the chaplain who races a modified Riley LMP3 at Pikes Peak

Deep breath, because there’s also a 1968 Ford Mustang with an EcoBoost four pot, a 1955 Ford F-250, a 1964 Ford F-100 with a modern Mustang GT350 5.2-litre Voodoo V8, another Ford F-100 with an electric powertrain, yet another F-100 (this time a 1972 that wears its patina beautifully), a Roush tuned sixth-gen Ford Mustang, a 997.2 Porsche 911 Turbo S bought from Copart, a Mercury Cougar that’s awaiting restoration, a Ford Torino, an ex-military Humvee and an F-150 Raptor daily. There’s also the excellently named ‘Holy Smoke’ for competitive tractor pulling.

Oh, and his son owns a 1957 Ford F-150 and his daughter a 1964 ice cream truck that acts as a summer earner and is fitted with a Cummins 6BT 5.9-litre in-line six. “It’s rapid,” says Don excitedly.

Photography: Huckleberry Mountain

Despite all that we’re not here to talk road-going creations. We’re not even really here to talk about the modified Riley LMP3 racecar that you see here (although more on that later). We’re at Blackhawk Farms Raceway right on the border between Wisconsin and Illinois, and we’re here to talk about Don, otherwise known as the Fastest Pastor.

Rather aptly, the rain is falling biblically onto the tin garage roof. Bad news for Don’s day of testing, but great news for TG as after just a couple of sodden laps he’s forced to give up bedding in a new fuel system and has to spend his morning talking to me. Luckily, Don is a very good talker.

I first heard Don’s incredible story thanks to what I would describe as a small and perfectly healthy obsession with the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. Heck, I thought I was a fan of the Race to the Clouds – for Don competing at Pikes Peak was a bucket list non-negotiable. As a kid he was obsessed with cars. His oldest memory includes a ’68 Ford Mustang and at 10 years old he got himself a farm job so that he could afford his own car. Six months later he bought two.

“You can’t hold this against me, but they were Simcas,” Don tells me. “This guy had two of them sitting on his lawn for years and I got them for 50 bucks. They were the most horribly engineered cars ever.”

After periods of homelessness, when the family regained a roof over their heads a young Don also managed to catch a Bobby Unser documentary on TV. Unser was a Pikes Peak legend and seeing him pilot an Audi Sport Quattro S1 up those iconic dirt roads clearly had quite the impact on Don. Years later, after his life had been upended, Wickstrum finally decided to follow in his hero’s footsteps.

Jump cut to 2018. Don owns a successful robotics company and having been an atheist until college is now a devout Christian aiming to spread his message through oval racing – talking to fellow drivers and fans with his wife Mary while running Christian slogans on his car. Then he’s diagnosed with colon cancer and given a year to live.

“I was on my way to speak at a Forbes summit, which was like the pinnacle of my career. On the flight there I didn’t feel right, and I heard this voice that just told me I was going to get rid of my business. Four hours later I was with my Amish doctor Jake and he’s sitting there telling me I had cancer.

“He said ‘Don, we won’t be here in a year having this conversation if you don’t sell that business’.

“The worst part is you get the diagnosis and because he’s Amish you have to drive like an hour before you get phone reception. He’s in the middle of nowhere. That was hard, but it gave me time to process everything.”

With a weak immune system from a previous illness, traditional cancer treatments were off the table, so Don set about using a series of natural medicines, pills and tinctures while changing up his diet and lifestyle.

“A lot of people think I’m anti modern medicine,” says Don. “I’m not. I believe God gifts everybody. He gifted people to create medicines. He gifted people to do natural stuff.

“I think one of the hardest things about this journey is you meet a lot of people who want you to tell them how to fight cancer, and I can’t do that. I’m not a doctor. I think really for every person it’s different and the best thing you can do is pray.”

Don did what he was told and sold the business, but with an uncertain future he decided it was time to fulfil a childhood dream. He felt God calling him to Pikes Peak. His first attempt at the mountain was in 2019, with Don’s small team bringing a 2013 Porsche 911 GT3 Cup racer down from Wisconsin.

The aim was never to win the race, but Don desperately wanted to reach the summit. That first year, an oil spill sent him spinning into the mountainside and ended his hopes before race day.

Still battling cancer, Don returned in 2020 with an updated version of the same car. “Second year was all my fault,” he says. “It was a big accident. ‘Sump’ is a double apex corner and I always felt really slow through it, so from when I left the start line that’s all I was thinking about. I thought that I could turn it into a single apex corner, so I stretched it out way to the left, and I was looking for my mark but by the time I realised I was carrying too much speed it was too late. I was airborne for two seconds.”

Remarkably, Don walked away from the massive impact. Almost like there was someone watching over him.

The 911 now sits high up above the Axel Speed Racing shop where Don and his team build and sell brilliantly bonkers project cars, while also working on top secret tech for the military. No church money is used for Don’s road or racing cars, so this is what funds the Pikes Peak programme. When we visit there’s a MkIII Honda Civic waiting for its K-swap, a two-door Subaru Impreza that has been 3D-scanned in order to facilitate a full carbon body rebuild, and a 3,000bhp diesel drag racing pickup on slicks waits for its new interior. Eclectic.

There’s also a Riley LMP3 car in bits, because when Don decided to go back to the mountain once again in 2021, he bought Riley’s whole programme to ensure he’d have enough spare parts and the moulds needed to make modifications.

The Pikes Peak spec LMP3 car has been christened ‘Gianna’, which apparently means ‘the Lord is gracious’. It’s running a Nissan VK50 V8 engine with a crank from the related VK56 and custom connecting rods and pistons. The result? Around 1,000bhp to shift the circa 1,300kg when it’s fully loaded with fuel and a driver.

It also features an Xtrac sequential gearbox, Alcon brakes and plenty of extra aero. Although because the car has to run so much more ride height at Pikes Peak than it would if it was on smooth circuits, it’s producing around 40 per cent less downforce than it’s capable of.

As the rain turns to snow at Blackhawk, we switch off Gianna’s neon lights and head into Don’s hometown of Monroe for dinner. Population around 10,000, although given it’s known as the cheese capital of the USA the humans are probably outnumbered by cows. Don says grace and we eat fried cheese curds while ignoring the old ‘no politics, no religion’ rules of dinner table etiquette.

“I think Pikes Peak the organisation was kind of wary of us at the start,” says Don. “But now they realise we’re not standing on soapboxes and condemning people, we’re just trying to bring people hope. I think that’s a message anybody can get behind.”

Don did reach the finish on race day in 2021, but due to poor weather the course was shortened and so he still hadn’t technically made the summit. That would eventually happen in 2022 after four long years of effort. Four years where he defied the odds to even be alive, let alone competing in one of the most challenging motorsport events on earth. But Don hasn’t stopped there.

Last year he took over the honorary role of Pikes Peak chaplain after Layne Schranz’s decision to call it quits in 2022. That sees Don – who’s also an associate pastor at Grace church in New Glarus – host a short service on the Sunday morning before the race.

“I’ve got a list of the racers and I pray for them,” Don tells me. When you learn that seven people have been killed at Pikes Peak since racing began in 1916, you can see why some might want to join in a prayer or two before heading to the start line.

He says he often hears from fellow competitors throughout the off-season who have had someone close to them die or get a diagnosis, and the heavy stories continue now that he has started a speaking tour with the Christian non-profit I Am Second.

“I think cars kind of saved me,” says Don, who I find to be kind, open and generous with his time. “I think God just kind of used it in a really unique way.”

It’s the chaplain role and the message of hope that keeps Don coming back to the mountain. Although don’t assume this is just missionary work for the Fastest Pastor. In 2023 he finished 13th overall and fourth in the Unlimited class with a time of 10min 00.297secs. “I accomplished everything I wanted to, but now it really is the ministry that keeps us going back,” he says before dropping in that he’d still like to set a sub-10 minute time. Oh, and this year it looks like he’ll finally be doing it cancer free.